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Techniques and intermediate elaborations
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The final stage in the elBullirestaurante creative process consisted of defining the elaborations that would appear on the tasting menu. To do this, Ferran Adrià selected from the season’s new creations that best reflected the creative heritage and new techniques devised during the year.
As well as introducing innovations in terms of products and the tools inherent to the creative process, new techniques were also created. These led to intermediate elaborations and new conceptual families that opened up new ground and led to an exponential increase in the creation of final elaborations.
Conceptual families can be defined as a set of intermediate elaborations or dishes with common characteristics that differentiate them from others and make them unique and recognisable.
These characteristics can include whether the intermediate elaboration is used for food or drink, whether it belongs to the savoury or sweet world, what cooking technique was used, what state or temperature the elaboration has, its structure, and so on.
For instance, some of the conceptual families devised throughout elBullirestaurante’s history include: ‘soup/sauces’, ‘new carpaccios’, ‘foams’, ‘snacks’ and the ‘frozen savoury world’. New ideas were drawn from these, leading to the creation of dishes worthy of an avant-garde fine-dining restaurant.
As well as introducing innovations in terms of products and the tools inherent to the creative process, new techniques were also created. These led to intermediate elaborations and new conceptual families that opened up new ground and led to an exponential increase in the creation of final elaborations.
Conceptual families can be defined as a set of intermediate elaborations or dishes with common characteristics that differentiate them from others and make them unique and recognisable.
These characteristics can include whether the intermediate elaboration is used for food or drink, whether it belongs to the savoury or sweet world, what cooking technique was used, what state or temperature the elaboration has, its structure, and so on.
For instance, some of the conceptual families devised throughout elBullirestaurante’s history include: ‘soup/sauces’, ‘new carpaccios’, ‘foams’, ‘snacks’ and the ‘frozen savoury world’. New ideas were drawn from these, leading to the creation of dishes worthy of an avant-garde fine-dining restaurant.
‘In 1994, we began to suspect that for our cuisine to develop at the pace we wanted, we would need to expand our idea of creativity and orientate our search not so much towards mixtures of products or variations on concepts that already existed to create new recipes, but to create new concepts and techniques. From then on, the technique-concept search was our main creative pillar, without abandoning other styles and methods, and this gave rise in subsequent years to our foams, new pasta, new ravioli, the frozen savoury world, new caramelisation, and so on. We can probably state that technique-concept creativity signalled one of the main differences between a cuisine that was merely creative, and one that was constantly evolving.’
Ferran Adrià
